SEO Audit
Articles and resources about the steps to take in performing an SEO audit on your website.
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SEO Audit Tips: 8 Examples of Why Your Source Code Matters
- by Glenn Gabe, Search Engine Watch, March 13, 2013. "... No matter how many SEO tools you use, you will eventually end up staring at the source code of a website. There’s not a single audit I’ve completed during my career where I haven’t been neck deep in the site’s code at some point.
If you know what you’re looking at, and what might seem off, you can nip SEO problems in the bud. On the flip side, if you miss those harmful pieces of code, and leave them unattended, you leave the site in question open to SEO damage. And that’s never a good thing..."
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SEO Audits & the Web Developer Plugin: 12 Helpful Features for the Technical SEO
- by Glenn Gabe, Search Engine Watch, December 6, 2012. "Technical SEO audits are one of the most powerful deliverables in all of SEO. They definitely provide the most bang for your SEO buck...
Looking for a plugin that offers a boatload of functionality and will help you conduct SEO audits? Meet the Web Developer Plugin for Firefox and Chrome.
This post won't cover everything the plugin can do, but will cover 12 of the most helpful features for performing SEO technical audits.
Using the plugin already? You should still check out the list below. There might be some features or tips that you haven't discovered yet..."
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How to Conduct a Technical SEO Site Audit
- by Bob Tripathi, Search Engine Watch, August 24, 2012. "Once you've finished your on-page SEO audit, the next step is to conduct a technical site audit. You don’t want technical issues to make it difficult for search engines to crawl and index your site, as that will make it tougher to rank highly and cost you traffic or potential business.
What follows is a checklist of items you should watch for when conducting a technical SEO audit..."
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How to Conduct an On-Page SEO Site Audit
- by Bob Tripathi, Search Engine Watch, August 3, 2012. "The first thing an SEO should do when given a new project is to conduct an SEO site audit.
A SEO site audit is a critical first step that SEOs must undertake to understand the state of SEO.
There are two basic options:
- A quick hit site audit where you go through the top level diagnosis with the site in a few hours.
- An exhaustive site audit that can take days..."
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The First 7 Items On Your SEO Audit To-Do List
- by Eric Enge, Search Engine Watch, September 19, 2011. "You've just been given one day to do an SEO audit for a site, and you're asking yourself what to do with so little time. Instead of following your instinct to yell at the person who made the request, today's column will outline a practical approach to doing the best job possible in one day.
The focus of this rapid audit is to identify issues at a strategic level - either because they are big impact items or may require large development team efforts to address. Given the one day restriction, we'll focus on identifying problems, not fixing them. This plan is not thorough, because you can't be in a day.
The major elements are:..."
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The 20-Point SEO Account Takeover Checklist
- by Andy Komack. SEarch Engine Land, June 24, 2011. "What should you do if you are stepping into a role as the new 'SEO Manager' of a website?
This is a question you could ask yourself either as an in-house employee at a company, an agency taking over an account from another agency, or moving into the role from one account to another within your agency...
Think of this checklist as a way to get up to speed as quickly as possible if your predecessor did not leave a very clear audit trail/documentation. Or, perhaps you are the first person to take on the SEO Manager role at your company?..."
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How To Do An SEO Audit
- By Michael Martinez. SEO Theory – SEO Theory and Analysis Blog, March 7, 2011. "The first step in any new SEO relationship is to conduct an audit. Imagine the poor client who has changed SEO providers several times. If the providers were all on their toes, they each conducted audits. Some businesses may dread the SEO audit process because, if done properly, it will be thorough and exhaustive. In fact, whether a company changes SEO providers or not, it's a good idea to conduct a thorough SEO audit at least once a year, especially if the business is drawing significant revenue from search traffic. The SEO audit should produce a snapshot of the state of health of a Website (and the publisher's SEO practices) at the time of the audit. The audit may identify problems but the problems should not be fixed during the audit (because the fixes change the sate of the Website's health). Inevitably someone comes up with some drastic the-world-will-end-if-we-don't-fix-this-now scenario that 'justifies' making changes during the audit. Such radical changes should be well and carefully documented but it would be best to defer them until after the audit..."
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How To Improve Organic Search Results With A Simple Site Audit
- by George Aspland. Search Engine Land, February 10, 2011. "Having a search engine friendly website, a site with no barriers to the search engines is critical to success within 'organic' search engine results. Here are some relatively simple SEO Site Review/Audit steps that should help you flush out the most important site wide issues within a small to mid size website. A SEO site review or audit should be conducted periodically; for example, a few weeks to months after a website is redesigned or after a major update, to allow enough time for the site to be fully re-indexed..."
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The Agency SEO Process - Part 1
- Written by Taylor Pratt. Search Engine People, 11 November 2010. "One of the questions I get asked the most is what my process is for SEO. It's a tough question to answer because it really comes down to how much control you'll have over the process and whether or not your time restrained. My SEO process is completely different for my own sites then for a clients. Having plenty of Agency experience, I thought I'd brake down how I usually setup an SEO program when on a budget. This will be a multi-post series, with each post focusing on three months of the project.."
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The Art and Science of SEO Site Audits
- by Adam Audette. Search Engine Watch, November 4, 2010. "SEO site audits are of critical importance. It is an investigation, analysis, diagnosis, and strategic dive into a site from the SEO, usability, and information architecture perspectives (most audits leave off the last two) that produces (through hard work and experience) a set of well-vetted recommendations. Site audits allow us to benchmark and baseline a site's strengths, weaknesses, and areas of opportunity; to prioritize the work that is necessary for a site to excel in organic search rankings; and to provide actionable, documented recommendations that guide a client's implementations. In short, SEO audits are essential..."
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SEO Audit Tool Comparison
- by Rhea Drysdale. Outspoken Media, 5 November 2010. A checklist of seo audit tools - their advantages and disadvantages.
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SEO Audit Outline Sample
- by Lindsay Wassell. Key Phraseology, July 8, 2010. "... today I'm happy to share with you the basic audit outline that I use. The first version was created years ago and I've carried it with me as my SEO career has evolved and had a number of smart folks weigh in. The point of this post is to give you a starting point if you are new to auditing or something to compare your own audit against if you’ve been at this a while..."
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SEO Audit Checklist
- by Jim. LunaMetrics, August 24, 2010. "... Generally, our first step is to do a quick (30 minutes or less) audit of the site to get a feel for where they're at and what they truly need help with. However, this 30 minute task can easily turn into a couple of hours if you don’t have something to keep you focused and on track.."
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10-Minute Missing Page Audit
- Posted by Dr. Pete. SEOmoz Blog, August 17, 2010. "... I'd like to share my 10-minute (give or take) process for solving one common SEO problem – finding a "missing" page. You can actually apply it to a number of problems, including: Finding out why a page isn't getting indexed; Discovering why a page isn't ranking; Determining if a page has been penalized; Spotting duplicate content problems
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SEO Site Audits: Getting Started
- Posted by Lindsay. SEOmoz Blog, June 2, 2010. "A typical SEO site audit takes me around 50 hours to complete... Regardless of how much time I spend on an audit, the best stuff is usually revealed in the first day..."
This category last updated: 14 March 2013